Jean Epstein’s writing highlighted cinema as the preeminent modern form, addressing the changing nature of labor and its fatigue, the new relative conception of time and space, and the virtuosity with which the camera machine gave perceptual access to a nerve-wracking world. His films were dramatic vignettes about love, friendship, and loss that engaged in variations of speed, magnifications of objects and bodies, manifold angles, and superimpositions. The films operated in parallel pursuit with his theoretical work to meet perception’s evolving demands. These qualities situate Epstein comfortably within the historical avant-garde, and indeed his writings are a continuous point of reference for filmmakers and theorists alike to describe a radically different, modernist cinema throughout much of the history of experimental film. Shattered perception, speed, and movement were key to both his films and his theoretical writing, which emphasized the ways the moving image could make bodily contact with the spectator. The significance of the camera’s mechanical nature to accomplish this bodily effect comes through clearly in his evocation of other sorts of moving transport:

Cinema begins with the external world; in this case, a landscape passes through the machine and ends affecting the body. From a moving vehicle, landscape becomes a ‘landscape dance’ that moves the body.